* ( Ying / Yoogle ? ) Wassup Yale and China? Gimme da 411.

Wassup Yale and China? Better to dance with the devil (or play pingpong with him) than to sit on the sidelines?

Is this a Swenson/Levin policy (might as well make friends with the heir-apparent to the mightiest economic force on the planet)? Or is it a New Blue policy; Get Yale in on the ground floor and maybe China's lust for prestige will have a salutary effect on their tyranny over free speech?

(The anti-communist Time/Life empire of Henry Luce'45W would have had a conniption fit--- and Yale's trustees would have had jerking knees --- at trafficking with the satan of socialism.)


Maybe Google and Yale should become partners on the free-speech issue (Yoogle?). Academic freedom without the Internet seems impossible today. Whether the search engine is Google, Bing (maybe Ying would be more acceptable) or wattevah.

Besides, it took the Vatican 400 years to take Galileo off the heretic-list ("The Vatican's clock ticks in centuries"): why should we expect China to modernize (a euphemism for democratize; both euphemisms for capitalism) in an instant? Let's not forget that it's taken America two centuries, a Dred Scott-disgraced Supreme Court, a Civil War, a martyred King and an Activist Earl, to even begin to live up to the rhetoric of its founding axiom: "All men are created equal."

Why should we expect China to fast-forward our 200 years of tyranny cloaked in white/male democracy in merely a few years?

History takes time.

Give time time .

And there's another very providential even prudential reason : China (unlike the United States) is about to become the world's behemoth producer of green-energy devices: from cars to computers.

Whether we like it or not, we cannot catch up without a World War II-Henry J. Kaiser- laser-beam-economic-devotion to such a project, and we're too fat and lazy for that---fiddling while Rome melts (even Yale's Old Campus will be under water in the next century according to climate change forecasts).

And then of course there's debt (or deabt might be a better spelling).

You don't bite the hand that feeds you
(even if the milk offered is tainted).

But you do hire a "taster."

















(Unfortunately, even our Food and Drug Administration is strumming on Nero's harp.)strong>